Bring on the backlash!



The end of innocence. The day we travelled to Bournemouth to see Arctic Monkeys play an arena for the first time. It's been a short, strange trip, watching as Arctic Monkeys turned from a genuine fanbase phenomenon to a national newspaper story to what they are now: a major international band, too big for the smaller venues where people fell in love with them. We caught onto them late - I've never been too cool to admit that - after the London Astoria gig that cemented their reputation, before they had their first number one; but once we'd downloaded all the demos and live tracks, we circumnavigated their ballooning success by getting tickets for a gig in Cologne at a tiny club called the Underground in November. It remains a magical memory: we could see the whites of their eyes (and their whiteheads, actually), it was like an away match, except for a team from the lower divisions; we bonded with other English fans, sang along, felt the visceral thrill of having travelled to a foreign place to catch a band play and even queued up to see Alex Turner afterwards and paid our respects. ("You were fucking brilliant," were my exact, starstruck words. "Cheers. Thanks a lot," were his in response. He's developed his interview technique a lot since then.)

Since Cologne, we've seen Arctic Monkeys in Dublin (first night of the NME Awards Tour - non-partisan crowd, relatively small, old-theatre venue), Sheffield (utterly partisan crowd, relatively small octagonal venue, basically a college gig) and London (biggest venue thus far, Brixton Academy, very much post-album success, much beer being thrown, lots of new fans, but still exciting, thanks to the venue itself). Bournemouth International Centre, upgraded due to ticket demand, is no place to see Arctic Monkeys. Not on a Bank Holiday Monday.



These photos were taken, by me, in the summer of 2004, when I went to Bournemouth to attend that year's Annual Tony Hancock Appreciation Society Dinner. Little has changed, except the KFC pavement-ads have been worn away by the traffic of chip-eating holidaymakers. The top one shows the Bournemouth Eye, a charmingly low-rent attraction, suitably branded by the local radio station. It's a balloon. You queue up, get in. It goes up. It comes down. Yesterday, as an added bonus, it was buffeted by high winds and looked pretty hairy up there. Bournemouth is one of those places that's stuck in the past but makes overtures to the present, and the two sit uncomfortably side by side. It's still a last resting place for pensioners, but must also attract "young people" or die, hence the appearance of superpubs like Walkabout. When I was here in 2004, I had to make my way back from the dinner, on foot, through the main thoroughfare at chucking-out and chucking-up time. It was like Newscastle-On-Sea. No place for promenading old folk.

This time, it being slightly out of season, there was room to move about the town freely and smell the vinegar and spun sugar, but there was still a hint of booze and danger in the air. And what with all those visiting Arctic Monkeys fans, it was a good day for the Tourist Board. We drove down (an hour and half, door to door, M25-M3-M27-A338, which rather surprised us, and left us with more Bournemouth time to fill than anticipated) and made use of the BIC's excellent parking facilities. We strolled the pier, breathed deeply of the sea air, searched unsuccessfully for a decent restaurant along the main street with restaurants on (all closed except for the pubs and chicken shacks), then struck lucky with a bistro attached to a hotel, the Lampeter, from whose terrace, against a rising breeze, we were able to eat reasonable fish and chips and salad, overlooking Bournemouth's famous gardens. But what of the gig?



The main hall of the BIC seems to hold about 6,700, according their website. Clearly, with an album having almost sold a million in the UK, there are enough fans to fill such a soulless space. Our seats were in the upper tier, K69 and K70, as far away from the Monkeys as we have ever been. This was, if nothing else, a novelty, and we were glad to have a seat while the below-par support acts were on. (For the record, Reverend & The Maker, all deadpan Mancunian swagger and New FADs shapes, were better than Liverpool's The Little Flames, who were like a limp version of Ghost Dance or some other Goth almost-ran from the late 80s - the crowd only really cheered when the useless singer announced their last song. It's a pity Arctic Monkeys didn't try a bit harder with the supports for their first post-album headline tour. What about some of these Sheffield hopefuls we've heard so much about? Whither Milburn?) After a few incidents down in the vast moshpit with security, including the break-up of a fight, which was an ugly thing to see, even from above, and the taunting release of a number of condom balloons in response to a beach ball being confiscated, to venue-wide booing, the band finally came on to riotous, roof-lifting applause. Even from a distance, this was chest-swelling to behold. And they've upped the lightshow ante, with well-chosen backlight and what I hesitate to call "spots", what the band's worrying skin problems at the moment. In all, it's a professional show, good sound, and a relatively generous set-length: that's an hour and ten minutes, a good 20 longer than they were alloted on the NME tour. So what went wrong?

The venue went wrong. Sitting up there, too far away to see the band's faces, with weak-bladdered idiots going to the toilet all the way through the set, squeezing back into their seats like latecoming patrons at a cinema, and people standing up to dance and being firmly advised to sit back down by overworked stewards ("for safety reasons," according to the signs - the same "safety reasons" that disallowed us from even taking water into the venue in a plastic bottle, another reason for security to have to constantly roam the auditorium, like a BIC KGB). I actually don't much like dancing in the tiny area in front of a fold-down seat, and I didn't mind sitting it out, stamping on the floor and banging my knees in time to the music, but the constant to-ing and fro-ing robbed the event of any atmosphere. Also, on another note of sheer geography, it was odd to see Andy, the bass player, standing so far away from Alex and Jamie, as if to make use of the bigger stage. (He threw down his bass at the end and kicked a mic stand, clearly unhappy with what had gone before.) Alex summed it all up with his first comment. Looking up into the vast nothingness, and referring to the upgrade, he said, "Well this is too fucking big."

It was. The band played brilliantly, with Matt metamorphisising into a Rock Drummer before our eyes (at least I think it was Matt, can't be entirely sure from that distance), Jamie occasionally moving from this mark and Alex still muttering to the crowd as if playing a tiny club ("This one's called Scampi And Chips"). Biggest treat - and unexpected, reading reports from previous gigs on the Monkeys forum - was a solo rendition of new song Despair In The Departure Lounge, a plaintive heart-tugger with an arch "Del Boy falling through the bar" reference from the forthcoming EP, and already a favourite in our car. Of course, it being new, and slow, and plaintive, the crowd treated it as an inconvenience before the next hit, and greeted it with what Alex described as "blank faces." Shame, really. It confirms his skills as both a songwriter and a performer, midway between Morrissey and Billy Bragg. (And is appallingly produced on the EP, by the way.)

The drive home was one of mixed feelings. Glad the band have so many fans. Not that keen on some of them. Glad we saw them when we did, where we did. Those days are gone. Looking forward to Brixton Academy, where the thrill will be retained by the sloping floor, the urban excitement and lack of stewards. We listened to the Morrissey album, the Secret Machines album and the Monkeys EP, whose title song (also played tonight), Who The Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys?, implores, "Bring on the backlash!"

Not yet. The Monkeys are still big, but the excitement got smaller.